Most existing audio-visual (AV) devices are configured in a static manner. The configuration operation is often performed at the installation of the device. This operation is typically tedious and generally requires reading long and complex manuals. Studies show that only 3% of users read these manuals; hence there are many calls to customer service regarding configuration of devices, and many unhappy customers.
The next generation of AV devices introduces networked devices. These devices include static AV products, as well as mobile ones. Cellular phones, MPEG readers, and cameras are examples of such devices. This new generation of AV devices needs to have automatic configuration and reconfiguration capabilities, so as to always get the best user-experience out of the networked AV devices. This configuration management problem has not only grown in importance, but also in complexity, as specialized hardware connections are replaced by configurable networking capabilities.
One option to solve this problem is to build a star-shaped network where the center of the star centralizes all the connections and provides the configuration management in a centralized manner. This present invention does not focus on this solution.
Instead, the present invention places the focus on a decentralized P2P configuration management solution, where each of the AV devices acts as an independent peer and participates to accomplish a distributed configuration management over the peers. This approach is potentially more resilient and better suited to increasingly capable and autonomous devices.